Alan Cooper (software developer)

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Alan Cooper 2010

Alan Cooper (born June 3, 1952 ) is an American software designer and author. Since 1992 he has been the owner of the Cooper company based in Palo Alto . He is considered the "father" of the Visual Basic programming language , the persona method, and is currently working on interaction design for software, hardware and web-based applications.

Career

Cooper grew up in Marin County , California . He studied architecture at the local college and worked as a programmer to finance his studies. After graduating from college and with the appearance of the first commercially available microcomputers, he founded his first software company, Structured System Group (SSG) in Oakland, California . This was also one of the first software companies for microcomputers and developed and sold the General Ledger business software . In 1980 he sold the company. Early on he worked with Gordon Eubanks on the development of the CBASIC programming language for business applications. Eubanks founded Digital Research with Gary Kildall, and Cooper worked there for two years in the development department before going back on his own. In the 1980s he developed business software such as Microphone II and the project management program SuperProject, which he sold to Computer Associates in 1984 . In 1988 he finally developed the visual programming language Ruby , originally intended as a toolbox for shells . This was taken over by Microsoft, who did not want to sell it directly to customers, but instead used QuickBASIC from Microsoft's old programming language for the development of Visual Basic. The VBX interface, for which third-party providers could bring in controls in the form of DLLs , was also decisive for the success .

In 1998 he received the Visionary Award from SVForum and in 1994 the first Windows Pioneer Award from Microsoft. In 2017 he became a Fellow of the Computer History Museum .

Interaction design and user experience

Early on in his career, Cooper began to take a critical look at the approach to software design. As he says in his first book, he believed that an important aspect missing - software authors did not ask, "How users interact with it Coopers early insights drove him to develop a design process that did not focus on what codes are but what could be designed to meet user needs.

In 1992, in response to the rapidly consolidating software industry, Cooper began advising other companies and helping them make their applications more user-friendly. Within a few years, Alan Cooper had started formulating some of his basic design principles. Together with his customers, he advocated a design methodology that puts the needs of the user in the foreground. Cooper interviewed the users of his client's products and discovered the similarities that made these people happy. From this practice, the use of personas as design tools arose . Cooper preached his vision in two books. His ideas helped drive the movement of user experience and define the craft that would later be referred to as " interaction design ".

Cooper's best-selling first book, About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design , was first published in 1995. In it, Cooper presents a comprehensive set of practical design principles, essentially a taxonomy for software design. By the second edition, as the industry and profession evolved, " Interface Design " had become the more precise " Interaction Design ". The basic message of this book was aimed at programmers: Do the right thing. Think about your users . The book is now in its fourth edition, entitled About Face: The Basics of Interaction Design , and is considered the basic text for the professional interaction designer. Cooper presented the ideas of the application posture , such as B. a "sovereign posture" in which an application uses most of the space and waits for user input, or a "transient posture" for software that does not run all the time or is not constantly occupied with the user. At websites he discusses "informational" and "transactional" attitudes in About Face .

In his 1998 book The Inmates Are Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity , Alan Cooper outlined his methodology, which he called Goal-Directed Design and which was based on the concept that software can Get users to their ultimate goal faster rather than getting them caught up in computer details. In the book, Cooper introduced personas as a practical tool for interaction design. Based on a brief discussion in the book, personas quickly gained popularity in the software industry because of their unusual power and effectiveness. Today, the concepts of interaction design strategy and the use of personas have been widely adopted across the industry. Cooper aimed the message of his second book to the entrepreneur: Know your users' goals and how to meet them. You need interaction design to get things right . Cooper advocates building design into business practice to meet customer needs and develop better products faster by getting it right the first time.

Alan Cooper's current focus is on how the advances in interaction design can be effectively integrated with the effectiveness of agile software development methods. Cooper regularly speaks and blogs about it on his company's website.

cooper

Cooper is a user experience design and strategy consultancy with headquarters in San Francisco and an office in New York. Cooper is credited with inventing several widely used design concepts, including goal-oriented design, personas, and "pair design". The company was founded in 1992 by Sue Cooper and Alan Cooper in Menlo Park , California under the name "Cooper Software" and changed the name in 1997 to "Cooper Interaction Design". Cooper was the first consulting firm devoted exclusively to interaction design. Her original customers were mostly software and computer hardware companies from Silicon Valley .

The company uses a people-centered methodology called "goal-oriented design," which emphasizes the importance of understanding the user's desired end-state and their motivations in getting there.

In 2002, Cooper began offering public training courses covering topics such as interaction design, service design, visual design, and design leadership. Cooper has been President of Cooper since it was founded in 1992. Cooper helps clients with interaction design challenges and offers training courses on software design and development topics, including their Goal-Directed Design (under the CooperU brand).

In 2017, Cooper became part of Designit, a strategic design arm of Wipro Digital. Cooper Professional Education continued as the teaching and learning department of Designit until it closed its doors to business on May 29, 2020.

bibliography

  • About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design. IDG Books, Foster City, California [et al. a.] 1995, ISBN 1-56884-322-4
  • The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. Sams, Indianapolis, Indiana 1999, ISBN 0-672-31649-8
  • with Robert M. Reimann: About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design. Wiley, Indianapolis, Indiana 2003, ISBN 0-7645-2641-3
  • with Robert M. Reimann and David Cronin: About Face 3.0. The Essentials of Interaction Design. Wiley, Indianapolis, Indiana 2007, ISBN 978-0-470-08411-3
  • with Robert Reimann, David Cronin and Christopher Noessel: About Face 4.0. The Essentials of Interaction Design. Wiley, Indianapolis, Indiana 2014, ISBN 978-1-118-76657-6

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Structured Systems Group | American company. Retrieved July 15, 2020 .
  2. ↑ 2017 CHM Fellow Alan Cooper: Father of Visual Basic. April 11, 2017, accessed on July 15, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Alan Cooper. Retrieved July 15, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Alan Cooper: A UX Legend On The Much-Rumored Death Of The Design Firm. October 7, 2015, accessed July 16, 2020 (American English).
  5. ↑ Personas in Action: Creating Sony's In-Flight Entertainment System. Retrieved July 16, 2020 .
  6. ^ Ian Schoen: Cooper's Interaction Design Challenge. May 12, 2014, accessed on July 16, 2020 .
  7. ^ Cooper and Cooper U, Part 1 :: UXmatters. Retrieved July 16, 2020 .
  8. ↑ Dr. Martin Cooper: The father of the mobile phone weighs in on the state of the wireless industry. In: TechCrunch. Retrieved July 16, 2020 (American English).
  9. ^ A farewell: Cooper Professional Education closes its doors. May 29, 2020, accessed July 16, 2020 (American English).
personal data
SURNAME Cooper, Alan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American software designer and author
DATE OF BIRTH June 3, 1952